The founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia said he is planning to launch a search engine which he hopes will be a potential threat to search leaders such as Google and Yahoo. Jimmy Wales said the new venture, dubbed Wikiasari, will be making use of the same user-based technology used for Wikipedia, according to a report in the London Times.
The search engine will be developed by Wikia Inc. and is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2007.
Wikiasari is a combination of words: Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning quick, and asari is a Japanese word meaning rummaging. Although, it looks like Wales and his team won't need to do much rummaging for investments. A good chunk of the multi-million dollar funding is coming from Amazon.com and a group of Silicon Valley financiers to support several Wikia projects, according to the report.
Growing Reputation
In the Times interview, Wales said he hopes that the reputation and growing popularity of Wikipedia will attract new users tired of the old search methods. According to Wales, conventional search-engine ranking algorithms lack the efficacy of human intervention.
"Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks'," Wales told the Times. "Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way."
"Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap," he said.
WikiWhat?
Wikipedia has been pushing off in new directions as of late, moving beyond its roots as an open source online project to which thousands of surfers contribute to make it the online encyclopedia.
Earlier this month the company said it will now offer free software, storage  , and network access, and that Web site creators can keep any advertising revenue generated for themselves.
Wikia calls the free hosting service OpenServing. It runs on an easy-to-use version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM, a sports fan community site that Wikia recently purchased.
"Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago," Wales wrote on the Wikia Web site. "People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend."
Wales will make use of the same concept and free software to create the search engine.
By tapping Wikia's OpenServing utility, anyone can set up and maintain their own collaborative content project for news and opinions for free.
Amazon.com is Wikia's first corporate investor. Wikia also received $4 million in funding in March from several other investors.
Wikipedia was launched in 2003 and is one of the most visited Web sites of the world.
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